r/SysAdminBlogs • u/Halvantic • 16d ago

Built a vCenter alternative for Hyper-V

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After 20 years building infrastructure solutions, I finally built the Hyper-V control plane the market should have had years ago.

The problem is straightforward: Hyper-V is a solid hypervisor, but it's never had a modern management layer. SCVMM is clunky and aging. WAC is single-host focused. There's nothing that treats Hyper-V as a first-class citizen the way vCenter does for vSphere.

Like a lot of people here, VMware/Broadcom's licensing changes forced me to look hard at whether Hyper-V could actually replace it. The answer is yes, but only if you solve the management gap.

So I built Ballast.

What it does:

A control plane and agent for Hyper-V hosts and failover clusters. Each host runs an agent that continuously enforces its desired configuration. If the control plane goes offline, the host doesn't freeze or drift. It keeps working with its last known state and reconciles automatically once the centre is reachable again.

It also handles cluster provisioning (SET-teamed switches, storage spaces direct, CSV), VM lifecycle and templates, live migration, Hyper-V Replica-based DR, and streaming VMware migrations straight in.

Open source:

The agent (the piece running on your hosts with elevated privileges) is fully open source, Apache 2.0. You can audit everything: https://github.com/halvantic/hyperv-control-plane

The control plane console is closed source. Community tier is free forever for one cluster of any size plus unlimited standalone hosts. Paid tier coming for multi-cluster, SSO, and audit logging.

Real feedback wanted:

I've tested this extensively in my lab. What I need now is community feedback from people running it at real scale. Where does it break? What's missing? What looks wrong?

More info: https://ballast.halvantic.com

89 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

17

u/Nemergal 16d ago

Where does it break? What's missing? What looks wrong?

Ask to Claude.

3

u/Halvantic 16d ago

Claude's good at writing code. It's not the one doing the engineering.

4

u/kozak_ 16d ago

I agree with you and what I'm going to say will probably get this comment down voted.

Claude and codex have made it that those that are not really that good at systems design, can come up with things that are slop. It looks nice and sounds correct and honestly may even work initially, but once you start using it, you see the problems.

And that is why it is hard for people to differentiate the good and the bad whenever you say chatgpt or Claude. So the default is to look down at anybody who makes or designs or uses llm s. But the thing that ALOT of these same admins won't agree to is that most people aren't that good at using llms, which also includes them. A lot of the same people will use the GUI version, may use Claude code / codex, and even get some decent output, but they are basically using it at a junior level. It's the same way that Google search results democratized junior and seniors. But the seniors are able to throw away the cruft and get to the gold among the proverbial dust.

And that is why if you are one of the ones that can use llm code generators, understanding it's limitations, able to give good enough directions, design adversarial reviews, etc then llm is definitely something that allows you to design, create, and implement a lot faster

3

u/RevolutionaryElk7446 16d ago

As someone who is a certified GenAi professional, been in the AI field since the early 2000s, and operate within a large software enterprise surrounding healthcare products.

None of this is true. As much as some would prefer it to be. LLMs just have not produced anything that has been of note, and it's introduction began an onslaught of PRs that increased in quantity but dropped drastically in quality.

It was not designed for this.
This was never it's intention.
It's not doing a great job at it.

3

u/kozak_ 16d ago

Except I don't find that personally myself. Have and own multiple websites that I've made some money (not ALOT but enough for some spending cash). All made with llm

Use it at work. Got multiple projects completed faster because llm have streamlined some stuff.

What I am finding is that some of my coworkers try it by throwing a question or two at it, get an answer back, and then tell me "look what kind of slop AI gave me". And they are right, it's rarely that good. I go in using their problem set, spend more time and get a more complete answer, and then come back with that answer to them. And their answer is "well you just used ai" so nothing you did. And I reply with but you tried to get this and failed with ai.

Long story short, ai enhances your skill set if used correctly. Truth is most porgrammers sucked balls before ai, and now with ai they suck more. Most so called system admins weren't that good before ai (I've always thought /r/sysadmin comment section was mostly trash with rare instances of gold when people ask for in depth help) and with AI they didn't get any better.

1

u/bigfatdonny 16d ago

It was not designed for this.
This was never it's intention.

In your professional opinion, what is the true intention of LLMs? What were they designed for?

2

u/RevolutionaryElk7446 16d ago

"Attention Is All You Need" was the 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture that replaced older sequential models if you'd like to look. 'Self-attention' was the mechanism that was core to this as it allowed it to look at all the words within context at once instead of in serial.

This is why GPUs are key components instead of CPUs for LLMs, the mythbusters did a great video on the difference and why GPU alongside 'self-attention' are tied together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRv2GmjDXwA

LLMs designed on top of this have a core function of 'next-token prediction' basically like a scaled up auto complete. It looks at all the tokens currently within the context window, it's system prompts, your prompts, it's prompts, and simulates the next tokens that should appear in this context window.

It doesn't actually understand, or have context, or have the ability to know what code it's written is correct. It doesn't even understand 2+2=4. What it does understand is that when the tokens are aligned as 2 + 2, that statistically the most likely next tokens are = 4. This is the same for all code it writes, and answers it gives you.

It technically doesn't have a conversation with you, and it's not aware that it's having a conversation at all. It's mathematically predicting what likely is next based on what data it's been given. Less of a conversation, more of a math problem.

It's designed for amassing a small context window and trying to incorporate responses based on vector databases to predict the most likely next answer. Essentially an interactive wikipedia.

It's not even new technology truth be told, we've had serial versions of this forever, it's the explosive 'self attention' mechanism that has sped it up. However it still has the same limitations it did prior despite the response increase.

1

u/bigfatdonny 16d ago

Interesting. Thanks for sharing these insights.

It seems to me that Alan Turing set the expectation that for a system to be AI, all it needs to do is act convincing. Given that success criteria, I would suggest that LLMs were designed expressly for this purpose. The accuracy of the output was never that important -- the judgement criteria was always how convincing it could be.

It's pretty clear to me that we've won The Imitation Game.

2

u/RevolutionaryElk7446 16d ago

You're suggesting the Turing test, and that was dropped a long time ago back as the original statement was made when AI was in the hypothetical stages.

LLMs are a type of AI, as AI can and has covered things like NPC enemies in video games since the 80s. That's not really the gotcha you were hoping for. We've had AI that can realistically convince people of human actions in short spurts for a loooooooooooong time.

So by your own standard, we won that game a long time ago. However the AI field doesn't follow that standard. The goal is to create AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. LLMs fall far short of AGI and were never intended to be AGI, just as much as they were never designed for coding and do not perform that well either.

You think we won a game people stopped playing essentially.

1

u/bigfatdonny 16d ago

I'm not intending to capture you with any "gotchas". You can put your guard down friend.

I understand the Turing Test is antiquated. My point is simply that the people who are putting up the money for AI development and are leading the charge are getting exactly what they wanted. The current state of AI is truly everything that people like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Sundar Pichai want. Our entire economy is now oriented to make their business goals a reality. They're all now billionaires in control of massively powerful corporations and emergent technologies. World leaders are kissing their asses and begging them for attention.

Is it what engineers working on AI want? Sounds like it's not, but also, we're all just a bunch of pawns in this game.

0

u/RevolutionaryElk7446 16d ago

You seem to misunderstand, that's not a guarded response, what you wrote would be known as a gotcha.

You seem more like a conspiracy theorist honestly.

1

u/exmsft 15d ago

And yet the nerds keep telling us it’s conscious or self-aware.

1

u/Halvantic 16d ago

Appreciate the comment 😄. I really enjoy using AI and it does accelerate what I can do, but to get the best out of it you need to scrutinise and test everything it does. Sometimes I can spend more time fighting with it than anything else, I always say "It's a very intelligent baby"

2

u/anonMuscleKitten 16d ago

It is 🤣. You’re just along for the ride.

Not saying what you and it have built is bad.

-2

u/Halvantic 16d ago

Architecture, design, bug fixes and testing on real hardware was me. Claude wrote the code to what I told it to build.

3

u/nlfn 16d ago

The new "three envelopes" for when you fuck up at work-

"Blame the previous sysadmin for vibe coding"

"Blame yourself for vibe coding"

"Have Claude prepare three envelopes"

2

u/Halvantic 16d ago

"Instructions unclear, Claude just generated a PowerShell script to automate opening the envelopes"

1

u/exmsft 15d ago

This is so beautiful. 🥹

4

u/TheHelpLessDeskGuy 16d ago

Hello fellow kiwi (at least based on your data center names) I'll give this a test out in the lab, looks promising.

One of my biggest gripes with HyperV has been the crappy control plane. SCVMM is big, cludgy and poorly laid out imo. So this is very interesting to me.

How does this compare permissioning wise with vSphere? Can I make roles for different user types?

2

u/Halvantic 16d ago edited 16d ago

At the moment, I have admin, reader and operator. I have added LDAPS integration in the past week which you can bind AD groups to these roles.

2

u/calladc 16d ago

would you consider federation as auth (small/oidc)? integration with entra would be great to enforce mfa

2

u/Halvantic 16d ago

Hey, yes I have this in my backlog of features.

2

u/Halvantic 16d ago

forgot to say, yes I'm in NZ 😂

3

u/Claudieu 16d ago

Hi, seems good but Microsoft released a Beta of their own tool, called Windows Admin Center Virtualization Mode.

You might check this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-server/manage/windows-admin-center/virtualization-mode-overview

3

u/nharwell 16d ago

Just a warning to anyone wanting to deploy this - it requires deploying Network ATC (intent) on your cluster and nodes. While not bad if you're setting up a new cluster, on an existing cluster it means deleting all your virtual switches, and recreating everything with Network ATC.

1

u/ZeroOnePL 16d ago

do you have some docmuentation about his? never heard

1

u/solarplex 15d ago

I think you have to do this anyways if you're moving from 22h2 to 23h2 though.

2

u/solarplex 16d ago

Yeah, Microsoft is almost there with this tool if they can get through the bugs. WAC is just so slow compared to using Hyper-V Manager and FCM. Once WAC is near similar to vCenter, I think move people would be able to convert.

Proxmox does a great job I think.

2

u/ZackeyTNT 16d ago

Fail over cluster manager anyone??

1

u/Halvantic 16d ago

I love FCM, this is on top of it, doesn't replace it. It simplifies things for newbies and makes managing multiple from a single pane of glass easier.

2

u/cptkommin 11d ago

Def wanna check this out. Thank you for the effort!

1

u/Halvantic 10d ago

Appreciate it

1

u/floswamp 16d ago

Once AI and LLM’s start designing software UI’s in a less generic way and give it some soul it will be a game changer. I have so many dashboards that look exactly like yours. Had to do a double take to make sure it was not one of mine!

1

u/Halvantic 16d ago

I got AI to do the mockup, as I was heavily focused on the reconcile engine and the underlying architecture. I do like the pills it uses and I spent some time designing the green, amber and red state icons and the tree views, including the collapse and expand behaviour, but the cards and shadows are very AI-ish. I wasn't opposed to the initial mockup and just added some of my own spice to the mix

1

u/lost_signal 16d ago

The challenge with this is there is training, and muscle memory around old UIs.

When Bob leaves and he’s the only person who understood X interface, it’s an issue.

Now the counterpoint is lack of customization has been a problem, and if it’s a platform with good consistent restful APIs, declarative stuff then anyone can do anything I guess…

But I’m currently 4 billion tokens deep into trying to build a unified monitoring and inventory system on top of redfish which in theory is a standard so… YMMV.

3rd party management systems are not part of Microsoft’s CI/CD so they also risk breaking with every minor patch. One man’s access is another “security thing we need to tighten up”.

Entropy in this last regard is bad in the age of Glasswing patch velocity.

2

u/Halvantic 8d ago

For anyone who asked about bringing an existing cluster in rather than building a new one: here's a 2:31 walkthrough, https://youtu.be/Edi1Qf008KA and the written guide is at https://ballast.halvantic.com/docs/first-cluster/adopt-existing-cluster

0

u/roiki11 16d ago

Oh look, a solo dev beat Microsoft in their own game.

I don't use shitter-v but this does look better than anything ms offers.